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5 Newest Pc Game Titles Tested

Conclusion:

There you have it folks, the five latest really interesting games to be released from a bevy of game developers. The graphics quality of the games we play continues to improve as the technology is made available to play at better than medium settings for a reasonable price. Since the price of games keeps rising (currently everything seems to release at the $49.99 price point in the US of A), the dollars available to spend on that latest video card just keeps shrinking. Kind of the reasoning behind this article was to see just how well some of the heavy hitters in $200 to $300 price range ran with the maximum or close to maximum settings in the latest games. Just in time for you to make that Christmas wish list so that the jolly fat man can make that special delivery to your door.

Performance-wise, the boys in green swept the field in the 1920x1200 resolution testing, not by a large margin in some games but more FPS is more FPS. The performance differences in Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Left For Dead are not that large at 3, 2, and 2 FPS when comparing a stock GTX260/216 card to the HD4870 1GB card in my testing. On the other hand, in Dead Space and Call of Duty World at War the Nvidia card offered huge performance increases when compared to the 1GB HD4870. Call of Duty WaW with a 21% improvement and a 27% increase in Dead Space at 1920x1200. That's huge.

There is not a single game in this performance preview that is unplayable at either maximum or close to maximum settings. Something that can be appreciated after the Crysis bomb was dropped and was found to be all but unplayable with any real quality if you wanted a decent FPS. So where on the price ladder do the latest cards fall? A valid question when your hard earned dollars are at stake. Well, with a quick search on Newegg I found that the HD4870 512MB could be had for as little as $210 while the 1GB version ran as low as $265, both solidly in the middle and lower end of the range. For the boys in green the GTX260/216 core can be had for as little as $229, while the lowest price on a factory overclocked card came in at $239, $25 cheaper than the 1GB HD4870. At least in this game and hardware comparison you have to give the Nvidia camp the win. The company is now competing on price as well as performance and seem to be on the winning side of the fence this go around. The margin is slim at times but higher performance with a decent price will always come out on top for the price conscious buyer, that being most of us!